Tina Fey Is Greek and Also Teutonic, but She Isn’t a Troll

“Tina Fey is an ugly, pear-shaped, bitchy, overrated troll.” Somebody once wrote that on a mean-spirited Web site, whence it could have vanished into oblivion. But Ms. Fey liked the remark too much to let it go.

So she has used it (sans “bitchy”) as one of the blurbs on the back of “Bossypants,” her dagger-sharp, extremely funny new book for which even the blurbs are clever. (“Totally worth it.” — Trees.) She also includes it in the book’s “Dear Internet” chapter, which she treats as a happy occasion to eviscerate a few well-chosen haters.

“To say I’m an overrated troll, when you have never even seen me guard a bridge, is patently unfair,” she argues. She goes on to take issue with the writer’s terminology (what if she got her shape from sitting in business-class airline seats too often?), thank him for his attention (“there’s no such thing as bad press!”) and suggest that it would take the Hubble telescope to locate his tiny genitals. “Affectionately, Tina,” she concludes.

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Tina FeyCredit
Platon

Why did Ms. Fey take that slur even half-seriously? After all, she is a powerful person. She really is the “Bossypants” of the title. She has a television show, “30 Rock,” that, by her count, employs almost 200 people. She has a Teutonic side. And she has been eerily morphed for the book’s cover into a freakish hybrid of pretty woman and big, strong, hairy-armed man. “I hope that’s not really the cover,” reads another of the book’s blurbs, from Don Fey, her father. “That’s really going to hurt sales.”

It could. But it’s a fair representation of Ms. Fey’s self-image as a smart, unyielding woman who has forced her way to the top of what is usually a man’s profession. “Only in comedy,” she writes, about interviewing for a writing job on “Saturday Night Live” in 1997, “does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.”

And only in comedy could Ms. Fey have achieved the apotheosis that could be seen on “Saturday Night Live” just before the 2008 presidential election. Some thought the feminist high point was Ms. Fey’s Sarah Palin-Hillary Clinton skit with Amy Poehler, but Ms. Fey sees it differently. “The moment most emblematic of how things have changed for women in America,” she writes, “was nine-months-pregnant Amy Poehler rapping as Sarah Palin and tearing the roof off the place.” Ms. Fey also writes about the point at which her foray into political satire became too much for her staunchly Republican parents.

“Bossypants” isn’t a memoir. It’s a spiky blend of humor, introspection, critical thinking and Nora Ephron-isms for a new generation. But it chronologically follows Ms. Fey through an awkward girlhood spent in Upper Darby, Pa., teenage years with a coterie of gay friends and a fish-out-of-water stint at the University of Virginia. “What 19-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top?” asks Ms. Fey, who calls herself Greek when she isn’t calling herself German. “What’s that you say? None of them want that? You are correct. So I spent four years attempting to charm the uninterested.”

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Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin and the cast of “30 Rock” celebrating its 100th episode last month at the Silvercup Studios in Queens.Credit
Jemal Countess/Getty Images

She moved on to Chicago in 1992 and began trying to entertain the uninterested, studying improvisation at the Second City, the sketch comedy theater with so many famous alumni. “I could go on,” Ms. Fey writes, after dropping the names of a few comedy all-stars, “but my editor told me that was a cheap way to flesh out the book.” And “Bossypants” doesn’t need to discuss anyone more famous than its sufficiently famous author. For all Ms. Fey’s efforts to depict herself as “a little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind,” she comes off as a strongly opinionated dynamo with a comedic voice that is totally her own.

One of this book’s funniest chapters describes why photo shoots are “THE FUNNEST,” as she puts it, for a woman not used to playing glamour girl. “Wherever it is, it’s nicer than where you had your wedding,” she writes about the studio where these pictures are apt to be taken. “The makeup artist at your photo shoot will work methodically on your eyelids with a series of tickly little brushes for a hundred minutes.” And “at really fancy shoots, a celebrity fecalist will study your bowel movements and adjust your humours.”

Ms. Fey deftly contrasts her show business and homebody aspects in “Bossypants,” very much the way her “30 Rock” character, Liz Lemon, flits between drudgery and fantasy. The voice of this book is quite similar to that of the television show, though Ms. Fey attributes much of the success of “30 Rock” to Alec Baldwin. She can’t say the same for her domesticated side. This book includes surprisingly down-to-earth chapters about Christmas holidays spent driving to visit in-laws and a honeymoon spent on a cruise ship. (“It’s just fun. Don’t overthink it.”) It also frets about whether Ms. Fey can have a second child while continuing to keep “30 Rock” aloft.

“Either way, everything will be fine,” she writes, setting up the last of this book’s virtually nonstop zingers. “But if you have an opinion, please feel free to offer it to me through the gap in the door of a public restroom. Everyone else does.”